When creating custom DTDs like the one below, all browsers except Opera see the end of the ATTLIST as the end of the DOCTYPE. The result is that they print "]>" on the screen.
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd" [ <!ATTLIST p behavior CDATA #IMPLIED> ]>
Test page. Workaround is not included
Reported by ppk.
Explorer 5-6 Windows, Explorer 7, Explorer Mac, Mozilla, Safari | Reported on 2 February 2005.
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2 Posted by ppk on 2 February 2005 | Permalink
I've heard this before, but haven't yet seen any evidence. Could you please create a test page that proves this and leave a link to it here in the comments?
Thanks,
3 Posted by Johnnie Blevins on 2 February 2005 | Permalink
He's right. I just tried it. This bug wasted multiple hours of my time a few months back, making me think I just didn't understand what I was doing. Thanks for pointing it out, and thanks Roger for pointing out the solution.
I took the liberty of copying the source of your frame into two test pages on my server.
http://johnnieb.the-knack.com/dtd.html and
http://johnnieb.the-knack.com/dtd.xhtml
are the same page, just with different extensions. The xhtml displays as it should, without the additional ]>.
I also checked this in Safari, and it, too, displays properly with the xhtml served as application/xhtml+xml.
4 Posted by Rogier Steehouder on 3 February 2005 | Permalink
Thank you Johnnie, that saves me the trouble.
The trick I tried at the time is to include a custom entity to obscure my e-mail address.
Defining <!ENTITY nw "nowhere.com"> makes an e-mail address look like "me@&nw;", which I hope no spider can figure out, but any decent xml parser can.
5 Posted by Sören Kuklau on 18 June 2005 | Permalink
While XHTML 1.0 Transitional allows the use of the SGML-HTML content-type, i.e. text/html, for legacy compatibility reasons (the result *not* being XML, and *not* being allowed to be parsed as such!), any other DTD does not.
Since your DTD is custom (even though it is XHTML 1.0 Transitional-*derived*), browsers are supposed to render the markup as XML, and to disregard the aforementioned exemption rule. Since you serve the page as text/html, i.e. SGML, not XML, browsers parse it as such, and in that case, the ]> characters are just that -- characters, not parts of a command.
IOW, while Opera does what you expect it to, it does so incorrectly, and the bug as you describe it isn't one.
6 Posted by zcorpan on 1 September 2006 | Permalink
According to the parsing section in Web Applications 1.0 (draft) Opera is wrong and the others are correct. http://whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#parsing
7 Posted by Chris Hester on 22 November 2007 | Permalink
I get a warning from the W3C Validator that the page is not valid XHTML. I'm using Firefox 3 on Mac to test with.
1 Posted by Rogier Steehouder on 2 February 2005 | Permalink
Firefox 1.0 (and I assume most Gecko browsers) does this right if you deliver xhtml pages as "application/xhtml+xml". If served as "text/html" it will make the mistake.